Information Technology Reference
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future users are given an opportunity to exercise their creativity, albeit in
the context of a controlled and limited brief.
Seely Brown and Duguid (2002) make an important point about design-
ers' roles in the contemporary, digital world: “ issues about the breadth or
narrowness of design are not, we should stress, issues for designers alone.
Increasingly we all live in a heavily designed world and need to under-
stand both the strengths and limitations of the designs offered to us. In
particular, we all need to be able to deal with the hype that accompanies
new technological design. In the digital world, moreover, many of the dis-
tinctions between designers and users are becoming blurred. We are all, to
some extent, designers now. Many questions about design are thus becom-
ing questions for us all .”
In contemporary society, citizens are making, and expect to make, deci-
sions about their lives that are effectively design decisions. The technolo-
gies which brought us mass production made a wide range of goods and
services accessible to a greater number of consumers, but with high stan-
dardization and limitations on choice (to quote the phrase attributed to
Henry Ford - a car in any colour as long as it is black!) Developments in
manufacturing mean that it is now both possible and economically feasible
to create products to a more personal specification. In many aspects of
consumers' lives there is scope for, and recognition of the demand for,
personalization. With digital technologies such as the personal MP3 player
and the personal video recorder (PVR), users are taking control of their
own listening and viewing, creating their own playlists and TV schedules;
our PC desktops can be personalized, as can the ring tones on our mobile
phones. Many people create their own web pages and weblogs for a variety
of professional and personal reasons. In all sorts of ways, many people are
having a significant influence on the way their immediate environment and
possessions look or behave: aspects which, in the past, would have been
likely to be the territory of someone with the title 'designer'.
As citizen/consumer power and confidence grows, the traditional roles
and power of designers becomes less appropriate. Instead, designers in the
21 st century now have the opportunity to develop the tools and techniques
to inform, inspire and enable citizens to influence the shape of future tech-
nologies. There is also an emerging role for a significant cohort of profes-
sionals to meet the fast-growing need to engage citizens, including the
young, the old, the disabled and those marginalized by beliefs, ethnicity or
life-style, in the articulation of their goals, needs, priorities and aspirations
in the context of ICT systems development. It is likely that hybrid skills
drawn from the social science community, human-computer interaction
specialists, and the public planning domain, among others, will be needed
to fulfill these challenging new roles.
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